It’s Heroes, Not Villains

[p]If you’ve spent any time on the CoH Official Forums (or anywhere else that fans of CoH congregate) you will have come across a request / demand / idea for a villain expansion. It’s a logical extention to being able to play a comic book hero; instead, we’d just be playing the dark half of super-powered characters.

[p]It’s a bad idea.

[p]I can see the appeal. Bad guys are generally dynamic, driven and form the key part of most conflicts your favourite comic book character has to deal with. Some of them get henchmen and very impressive costumes. But a problems exists in being a villain – it requires responsibility.

[p]Villains have responsibility to the story they are part of. They may be unaware of this responsibility, but it’s generally there. In the majority of comics, it is the villains’ actions that drive the hero(es) to respond and provoke a chain of events. These events usually conclude with the hero beating up the villain; the amount of blood shown depends the proposed maturity of the reader.

[p]Unfortunately, you can’t give players this kind of responsibility. It wouldn’t work. Some players in attempting evil would just end up being petty, which can be much more annoying. Villains should lose the big missions, but players hate losing, making a villainous existance even less fun. There would also need to be fratanation (sp?) requirements so that a bad guy (or girl) couldn’t cause havoc all day, then retire to the local bar for a social night with the same heroes they’d been fighting.

[p]There are just too many issues that need to be fixed for PC villains to work on a large scale. Could you be a hero and villain on the same server? Can villains team up with each other and / or other heroes? Can they get henchmen? What do they win when they successfully complete a mission against some heroes? How do the devs punish a ‘bad’ villain who is actively attempting to inhibit the fun PC heroes can experience (and who argues that this is exactly what a villain whould do)? All of these issues and more would need to be dealt with. The devs would need to split their time between hero and villain issues, attempting to balance out the needs to two player groups that are playing very different roles. It would be a nightmare.

[p]As I said before, I can see the appeal of being a villain, especially in CoH. But I don’t believe that the majority of players could be an effective villains and provide enjoyment for other players by being one. If the devs can get me living the life of a superhero at least part-time, well, that will be enough for me.

[p]Along with E3’s large public display of CoH came the news that things were no longer as we knew them. Gone was the proposed ‘open’ character development system that allowed a player to choose an origin and any powers they wanted; in its place was an archetype system that will force players to play the particular roles of Blaster, Controller, Tanker, Scrapper and Defender, each with its own advantages. As the community came to understand what the changes meant there has been much discussion about it, both in negative and positive terms. The most recent IGN dev diary by Statesman has gone into some detail about why the decision was made.

[p]The open system was apparently ditched for two main reasons: 1) players could create gimped characters and 2) player could create invulnerable uber-characters, aka tank-mages. Unfortunately, it appears that the very strength of an open system – flexibility – could be used against it. Now, I can’t say whether or not CoH is more fun under either system since I’ve logged not one second playing CoH. Only the people who have played both versions could tell you that. But from my experiences in other mmogs (both forums and in-game) I can completely understand how these problems would impact the game.

[p]Players usually don’t give mmogs much of a chance once they hit pay to play (p2p). Anecdotally, there appears to be a burst in play-time as the players experience the thrill of a new game and the first thing they don’t want to run into is that they’ve gimped their character. After sinking multiple hours into a game, most players will possibly change characters and try a new idea. However, it is a bad idea to put barriers in a player’s way that would see them repeated need to fix characters because they didn’t make them exactly right, ala Shadowbane. Having found out they’ve wasted their time with a character, a player will quite possibly go “This sucks – I’m leaving” and cancel at the end of the next billing cycle.

[p]This leads into the tank-mage problem. In order to avoid possibly hamstringing themselves, players will often try to answer the question “What’s the best character type?” – just check the general forums of almost any mmog and you’ll see just how often this question is asked. Having obtained a recipe for the ‘ultimate’ character, hordes of players will follow it relgiously in order to ‘win’ the game. An open system is particularly vulnerable to such abuse as powergamers nut out the most effective mob-beater through trial, error and lots of time logged on. With no restrictions, it is very easy to see CoH become Wolverine Clonetown or Supermanville as casual players pick the powerset(s) of the month that will make things the easiest for them.

[p]This will still happen to some extent with archetypes. Time and time again it has been shown that mmog players will pick the path of least resistance, meaning that certain powersets for certain archetypes will become chosen purely because they are ‘best’ at fighting mobs. However, under the archetype system it would seem that such uber-characters are a bit more controlled by not being able to ramp up both their defense and attack powers at the same time and perhaps being made a bit more reliant on other players to counter-balance their archetype weaknesses.

[p]Realistically, the community won’t know how archetypes truely work until we can get our hands on the game. However, given the information provided by Statesman, it is easy for me to see why the decisions were made and agree with those reasons. Cryptic have done the right thing by restraining player choice, even if it takes away from the comic book feel of CoH – at the end of the day, CoH will be a computer game and the majority of players are going to treat it as such.

[p]Sleeper from Wildstorm is one of my favourite reads at the moment. It deals with Holden Carver, an IO double agent stuck in deep cover within a worldwide criminal organisation. Unfortunately, the only person who knows he’s a double agent is in a coma; to the rest of the world Holden is just an IO agent who went bad. Another problem is that Holden is good at his job as a bad guy and has been promoted all the way up the ladder. One small slip could give him away, so he’s stuck doing the dirty work.

[p]I love this series for a number of reasons. Firstly the writing and characters are just spot on; these are the bad guys but they aren’t cardboard cut-outs. Secondly the powers of the characters are pretty original (or at the least different) from those found in ordinary comics – have a look at Miss Misery’s origin for an example of this. Thirdly Sleeper‘s art is just perfect to set the mood of the world it contains – dark and shadowed – and really adds to the effect. Fourthly I find Holden Carver to be a very appealing character – stuck in the middle with no-one he can really trust, he is really breathing by the roll of the dice. There is a true paranoid desperation to everything he is continually forced to work without a net.

[p]Sleeper is a mature comic in that it contains semi-realistic violence, sex and adult concepts – if those things put you off, stick with Archie. However, I think this is a gem of a comic that mixes the spy / superhero / crime genres nicely and you don’t need to know anything about the Wildstorm universe to read it. I don’t know if it will every be collected into a graphic novel, but if you can find the first few issues (it’s up to #8 at time of writing) check them out – you may like what you see.